ETech 2009 Schedule: Full Listing

Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at ETech 2009 (schedule subject to change).

Customize Your Own Schedule

Create your own ETech schedule using the personal scheduler function. Mark the tutorials, sessions, keynotes, and events you want to attend by clicking on the calendar icon next to each listing. Then click on "personal schedule" below and get your own customized schedule generated.

Scratch is a new, open source programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is often described as a tool to teach kids how to program. This workshop will introduce Scratch to programmers and non-programmers alike.
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The Economist has defined services as “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.” Where businesses once viewed services as a necessary but inconvenient accompaniment to their product offerings, they now increasingly look to designers to develop holistic, human-centered, and innovative service solutions that can help expand profits and cement brand loyalty.
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Come build a shirt that sings when you're squeezed, a purse that sounds an alarm when someone touches it, or a jacket that shines and sparkles at your command. This workshop will guide you through the process of building an interactive garment that incorporates touch sensors, light, and sound.
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Objects are beginning to socialize. A new era of low-bandwidth, low-power wireless networks is enabling a revolution in device communications. In this DIY session we'll insert you into those conversations and introduce you to device communications technology that could change our homes, cars, and clothes.
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Designers and developers are advancing the state of online mapmaking at a dizzying pace. The introduction of global slippy maps in 2005 represented a new era of interactivity and sophistication in geographic user interfaces. Are we on the cusp of another such leap? Stamen says yes, and shows what new work and new advances are being made to push the envelope still further.
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Even if you've never even sewn a button, you can learn to make cool things with microcontrollers. Microcontrollers can do so many things: turn off TVs in public places, trip out to your brain waves, move objects, play games -- you can make microcontrollers do it all. It's easy, it's fun, it's where it's at!
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Ever wanted to get a real understanding of how RFID works? In this workshop, you'll learn about the different classes of RFID devices. We'll discuss what RFID can and can't do, what devices are already on the market, and what kinds of future applications are possible. $70 materials fee required.
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If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you pitch a project? Launch a website? We'll find out at Ignite ETech.
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The American family consumes resources vastly beyond its "share"--more so than other nation's family. However, due to technology, increasing environmental awareness, and a changing economy, it is also the best poised to make a course correction. Worldchanging's Alex Steffen returns to show the results of his latest project about how to make us more sustainable.
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WITNESS works at the intersection of human rights, media, and technology, and was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel. Our mission is to use video and new technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations.
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The key to developing low-cost computing in developing markets is power consumption. An often overlooked aspect of that is the screen. Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the OLPC, has started a new company aimed at a low-cost, low-power screen. She will share insights gained in manufacturing, developing, and deploying this new technology.
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Financial technology – something we all thought was complete – has been upended. Fundamental assumptions have been exposed as faulty. And now we have the opportunity to recreate our finance industry from the bottom up. We have a choice: a path of openness and information sharing, or more opacity and secrecy.
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China is one of the U.S.'s biggest trading partners, and is one of the premier regions for manufacturing electronic goods of all types. When startup Chumby Industries needed to migrate their U.S.-built Chumby device prototypes to production, they sent bunnie Huang to China to build the Chumby supply chain.
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The design and production of physical/digital spaces is at the heart of what we call the Programmable Environment. Instead of environments complete and fixed in time, subject to renovation or demolition when their purpose is no longer relevant, the result is a spatial system designed to evolve over time, in interaction with the users who inhabit it.
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As we progress to a post-scarcity society, either you'll measure your consumption or someone else will. More data is becoming accessible than has ever existed. Whether driven by climate change, peak oil, or economic change, sustainability is now a fundamental factor of your business and your life. We'll unpack and map the dramatic changes coming to industry, markets, politics--and you.
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Distributed networks create distributed ownership. The identification and wireless networking pieces of ubicomp allow us to turn familiar objects into subscriptions. At a fundamental level, this affects how those objects look, work, and are used, and it changes our understanding of the nature of ownership and utility. What has already become a subscription? What will?
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Come and check out MAKE at ETech 2009. We'll have the Maker Shed on site where you can purchase electronics kits, participate in demos, hack your own creations, and customize your official ETech Conference T-shirt!
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txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash. http://txteagle.com
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More and more we use biological metaphors for our technology. Cars break and are fixed, but computers get infected. Technology evolves, competes, exploits our emotions. We are the ecological niche for technology. And its uses of us may be no more benevolent than our uses of our own ecological niches.
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The business benefits of open source software are well documented. But can the same or similar benefits also be realized by using open source hardware (OSH)? Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, will address some of these issues, discuss the opportunties and challenges, and provide anecdotes from his experiences at Bug Labs.
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WITNESS founder Peter Gabriel had a vision - a place online where anyone anywhere could upload and share video footage or stories about human rights, and where this video would kept safe, and used to create action.
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Consumerism is crashing, but the logic of digital, networked products promises a path forward. The emerging sustainable economy connects a renewed "repair culture" to reputation systems for companies and customers. It leads to the platformization of everything, ultimately allowing digital products to drive an overwhelming share of economic activity.
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Chronological age is the primary risk factor for lethal conditions such as cancer, yet we spend the vast majority of our resources on a disease-by-disease basis, "treating the symptoms" without addressing the underlying cause. Patil will describe and defend our efforts to understand the biological basis of aging, as well as efforts currently underway to intervene in the aging process.
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Flexible paper-like displays will replace the use of print on paper in many applications such as books, newspapers, and calendars. The required attributes of these new displays are readability in a variety of lighting conditions, low power consumption (bi-stability), light weight, mechanical toughness, and low cost.
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The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project is the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast. When complete, the project will restore 15,100 acres of industrial salt ponds to a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other habitats.
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Life hacking. Brain training. One and the same. The brain's frontal lobes enable our goal-oriented behavior, supporting our so-called "executive functions," which can be enhanced with targeted practice. Such as life hacking. This session will provide an overview of the cognitive neuroscience underpinning life hacking, and review the state-of-the-art of non-invasive tools for brain training.
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The greatest sports athletes' records live and die by their hi-tech gear. They use new swimsuits like the razor to shave seconds off their laps and sensors like the Nike+ to record their training. Michael Tchao of Nike Labs will share with us the process behind these creations and the new materials and technology that make them happen.
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Recent innovations in materials and processes have radically changed how stuff is made. There's not much talk, though, about how stuff is un-made. In this talk, Igoe will explain where stuff goes when you throw it away, how that's affecting the environment, and how sharing some of the intellectual property of the making process can facilitate the un-making.
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We are currently in a time when sharing and social networks are changing the way we consume editorialized media and the definition of "'content" is increasingly blurred. In the R&D Labs at The New York Times we are exploring some of the questions around how we will consume information in the next 2 to 20 years.
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It has long been an unfortunate fact that the World Wide Web cannot be safely used by the vast majority of people in the world. From advanced Flash and JavaScript attacks to vulnerabilities in the fundamental technologies powering the Internet, the last several years have brought a new slew of techniques that are undermining the already shaky trust relationships that make web commerce possible.
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The number of technologies for healthier and more sustainable urban living can seem overwhelming. This talk introduces four frameworks for thinking about technology design for environmental living in cities in general and urban agriculture in particular.
Liz will introduce three frameworks researchers and designers have used to design technologies for sustainable living in cities and suburbs
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Want to help fix democracy? Hackers, those crazy Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes, have begun a sustained assault on government with projects like the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress, GovTrack, Watchdog.net, FedSpending, MySociety, and Public.Resource. The goal?
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Four phrases come to mind while summarizing the last decade of computing: “anywhere and anytime,” “always-on,” “open source and available to all," “social networks that reach beyond geographical borders.” This talk explores the importance of localized experiences with technology, using a variety of examples from India, China, Brazil, and many other countries.
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Does paper vs. plastic even matter compared to how you got to the store? Everyone today is aware that there are looming environmental problems, and many are looking to create change. This talk derives a list of the industries and areas of our lives that most need change, in order of priority, and suggests what some of these changes should be.
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Half the world lives on less than $2.50 per day and has minimal access to education. The Playpower Foundation is using a radically affordable $12 computer, based on an old video game console technology (now in the public domain) as an 8-bit platform for learning games. Global poverty meets 8-bit design constraints--with only an open source community of 8-bit hackers in the middle?
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In this highly interactive and energetic workshop, participants will learn from each other, joining technology experts and IEEE-SA ProductNEXT presenters in shaping the future of technology standards. We want to hear from you. How could today’s standards be improved for emerging technologies? Do standards restrict or slow new technology processes?
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Three leaders in the technology and law of synthetic biology will present a crisp and accessible briefing on new cooperative efforts to make tens of thousands of open source standardized DNA parts. Discussion to follow.
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What happens when high-tech chocolate factory meets high-tech research lab? TCHO of San Francisco is a new kind of chocolate factory, founded by a Space Shuttle technologist and a chocolate industry veteran. TCHO is working with FXPAL, a high-tech research lab in Silicon Valley, to apply emerging technologies in clarifying end-to-end chocolate production processes.
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True innovation in materials takes on many forms, and for 80% of the world's population means the effective use of often scarce resources. "Technology Transfer," a term used to refer to the process of converting academic research into usable products, is just as important whether between the developing and the developed world or between two disparate industries.
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What coming in robots? More than just the butler bot, we can expect to see many robots in all aspects of our life - home, work, hospitals, schools.... Single task robots will permeate our lives, as will telepresence bots giving us the ability to truly bi-locate. Noone can predict the future, but we can get a sneak peak.
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The Semantic Web holds the promise of enabling search engines to understand webpages better than ever, leading to greater opportunities in how information can be presented to users. SearchMonkey is a Yahoo! Search application platform that promotes the structuring of the Web among site owners and developers. Attend to learn more about SearchMonkey and discuss our use of structured markup.
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Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions provide face to face exposure to those interested in the same projects and concepts.
BoFs are happening Tuesday and Wednesday in the Redwood, Crystal, Gold, and Empire Rooms from 7:30p - 10:30p on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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When we look at the world around us we see many examples of places and spaces that we both love and hate. What would you "cut and paste" from different parts of your city to create the ideal sustainable urban environment? Arup has spent a number of years discussing what the eco-city would need to look like if we are going to move towards an Ecological Age.
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TCP/IP and The Web were open standards and specifications that created an explosion of innovation by lowering friction and transaction costs for interoperability. Creative Commons is creating a new layer of open standards and specifications for interoperability and to lower friction at the legal/copyright and semantics layer.
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Explosives are usually linked to military uses or mining. Today there are other uses for explosives on a large scale (diamond manufacture) or on a small scale (cartridges to operate instruments or machinery) or somewhere in between.
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We've built a new type of interface that brings computation into our physical and gestural world: a set of cookie-sized, gesturally aware, neighbor detecting wireless displays that act together as one interface. We call them Siftables.
People live in and know about the physical world. Computers should too.
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Research generates huge data sets. New formats in the semantic web bring great promise to convert portions of the scientific canon into machine-readable formats, at the same time that new collaborative lightweight methodologies allow us to represent scientific arguments and knowledge formation in real time. The Science Commons hopes to provide the infrastructure to make this happen.
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A community organized event designed to share and improve the essential skills required to participate in collaborative and innovative projects. The event features a mix of educational presentations and hands-on coaching from experts in participatory communities, and will run 11:00am – 5:50pm Wednesday and 8:45am – 12:40pm Thursday.
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Come and check out MAKE at ETech 2009. We'll have the Maker Shed on site where you can purchase electronics kits, participate in demos, hack your own creations, and customize your official ETech Conference T-shirt!
Read more.

What are the five biggest problems the world will face in 2019 – and how can we get a head-start on solving them together? Find out in this talk, which presents the results of SUPERSTRUCT, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.
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Aaron Koblin will discuss the process of turning data into visual expression. As director of technology on Radiohead's latest music video for "House of Cards," he worked with sensor technologies as an alternative to traditional video. Koblin will also discuss his role at Google's Creative Lab in San Francisco, and discuss some of his other data-visualization software.
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Mike Mathieu outlines the emerging civic software movement where tech-savvy heroes leverage rapid development and improving web infrastructure to build projects and services focused on social impact. You'll come away with a new understanding of some key players in the space, as well as some specific ideas for actions you might take with your professional skills.
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We typically think of the mobile phone as a device belonging to and used by an individual. Yet in urban India, people share their mobile phones in unique ways, regardless of class and depending on where they are in the city.
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In 1900 about 40 percent of Americans (40 million) lived on farms, and a similar percentage worked on farms. People were makers by necessity, and as a result they acquired many useful DIY skills that they applied to their leisure activities as well.
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Diseases are spreading faster. To detect them we need to enable faster and accurate communication that can create life-saving responses. How do you do this without Western infrastructure in the jungles of South East Asia? InSTEDD has been building SMS and mapping applications while figuring out multilingual issues, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems.
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As more of us generate GPS data with our mobile phones, how can this aggregated information give us an unprecedented new understanding of the people, places, and rhythms that make up our cities? Location data combined with learning algorithms lets us cluster different places and people into social categories and tribes.
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One of Yahoo!'s major goals is to become more open through the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). At the heart of Y!OS is an open and extensible platform that allows developers to rapidly access Yahoo! network data and develop applications with access control using an open authentication standard.
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Understanding how humans can better interact with and consume information is critical as we work to solve the increasingly complex challenges before us. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch will explore three aspects that will shape the next generation of computing applications.
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From communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” Mobile phones as “personal measurement instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of computing usage called citizen science. Through the use of sensors paired with personal mobile phones, citizens are invited to participate in collecting and sharing measurements of their environment that matter most.
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What do Japanese geeks, teenagers, and high school girls do for hours behind their computers and cell phone screens? Katayama and Yamazaki demonstrate several examples of web apps and gadgets that are fun, creative, and uniquely Japanese. Through these, we see how crucial, hard-to-grasp aspects of Japanese culture materialize as new obsessions when technology is thrown into the mix.
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The collection of networked notes and devices in our environment is growing rapidly. These nodes and devices, already collecting and generating massive amounts of data, must be programmed and managed.
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People knit scarves and solder radios together in their homes and garages. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.
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What does the platform look like that allows digital architects to layer interaction models from massively multiplayer gaming and Wii-like gestural performance onto urban-scale environments? We are building software, initially for an amusement park in Dubai, that integrates the datastreams from thousands of modular sensor nodes into a high-resolution realtime spatial model of people and objects.
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A "hacker space" and a "community center" sound like different places, but spaces organized in the last year, like NYC Resistor and HacDC, have merged the two. These are cross-disciplinary, self-organized, adult-education centers, mostly focused on technology, with heavy detours into related sciences and crafts, and they are alive with learning. You could build one in your city, too!
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This talk will trace the history of personal data collection from its surprising roots in the 18th century into its future as a form of self-knowledge. We will see some of the great self-tracking projects of the past and present. No products will be reviewed! This is a talk about the why of self-tracking, with illustrations from real experiments.
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Discover MIT SENSEable City Lab latest research in urban informatics and discuss our projects, from the analysis of social dynamics in urban environments, to the development of prototypes of future interfaces and services for the city and its inhabitants, up to the deployment of urban furniture that crosses the boundaries of architecture to explore the impact of new technologies in urban life.
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Constraint--the Conference's theme--is not only a set of conditions against which design must struggle, to constrain is also itself a design strategy. Cambrian lurches forward in design ecologies tend to occur in response to an emergency, often a war.
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Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while in Academic Research. Today, AR is being used for industrial, marketing, and mobile applications. This talk will present metaio’s timeline of AR applications, as well as the advancement of the technology. And, what is yet to come.
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Schneider's multidisciplinary work attempts to investigate human and technological interdependence. Schneider sees this interdependence as both emotional and physical. We are all infinitely removed from everything, everyone, and from ourselves. Our inners do not connect to our outers with any sort of transparency. Language separates us from the experience of the real. All of us is filtered.
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Zoë Keating is a cellist. She plays solo, with rock bands, and writes music for film and ballet. Her musical process involves live looping and layering. Keating will demonstrate how to use a 17th century instrument and a laptop to make electronic music, and discuss the metaphysics of looping sound.
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Mobile will be the way people use the Web of the future: the only debate is how quickly the transformation will happen: 3 or 5 years. An introduction will be provided on how to avoid the proprietary nature of new mobile platforms and leverage Web 2.0 to build killer, cross-platfrom apps. Those interested in mobile should attend and share their experiences.
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Historically, 3D on the Web has always been associated with difficulties. Although 3D has been around for decades, from research labs to gaming to visualization of a 3D earth, there are numerous reasons why 3D is still having majority adoption challenges.
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Software bugs can let people take over your computer, but finding them is time-consuming. Learn how new advances in solving systems of constraints make it easier to find bugs by leveraging exactly how software works. Learn about Metafuzz, which uses Amazon's EC2 infrastructure to test Linux binary programs on a large scale. Finally, learn about other applications of solver technology.
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A community organized event designed to share and improve the essential skills required to participate in collaborative and innovative projects. The event features a mix of educational presentations and hands-on coaching from experts in participatory communities, and will run 11:00am – 5:50pm Wednesday and 8:45am – 12:40pm Thursday.
Read more.

Come and check out MAKE at ETech 2009. We'll have the Maker Shed on site where you can purchase electronics kits, participate in demos, hack your own creations, and customize your official ETech Conference T-shirt!
Read more.

It is clear that our lifestyles have become environmentally and economically unsustainable. The solution will need to include widespread power reduction. To this end, WattzOn provides a structured wiki-based tool to allow users to track personal power usage, understand steps they can take to lessen their impact, and improve the accuracy of the system by modifying the methodology and data.
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Wheelchairs aren't any more complicated than bicycles, but they cost a ridiculous amount of money. They shouldn't. Neither should other simple accessibility and mobility equipment. You can't stand up all day at your desk, but you don't need a doctor to prescribe you a $6000 office chair. Open source gadget designs will help create a truly healthy industry and a culture of free invention.
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Why wait until retirement to explore the world? Two Gen-X geeks decided to give up their conventional homes almost three years ago to create a conscious merging of life, work, sustainable living, and adventure. They share their adventures, practical advice, and insights to living nomadically on the road while utilizing mobile technology to operate their lives and tech businesses.
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Stamen has been extending its work with interactive mapping and data visualizations past the slippy map metaphor into new territory, allowing you to reach through the pins-on-a-map approach that characterizes most work in this field. By making the entire screen an active interactive surface, we're expanding the possibility of what online urban mapping can do.
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The discovery and mastery of new materials throughout history have caused societal upheavals that dwarf our more recent digital revolution. In this lively talk, history of science junkie Chris Spurgeon shows how breakthrough materials changed the world. He'll also explore how we can all prepare ourselves for the materials revolutions to come.
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A beach robot measures established and experimental water quality parameters and offers itself as a resting spot in the water. Life guards interview swimmers and send the results to the floating robot where the human input and the machine data are merged to a joint, the swimming pleasure measure, an extended water quality metric neither humans nor machines can generate alone.
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Design is a kind of authoring practice, crafting material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Design’s various ways of articulating ideas in material to create social objects and experiences is similar to writing fiction. This is a presentation about the relationship between design, science fiction, and the material elements that help tell visual stories about the future.
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The story of how robot cars, no longer science fiction thanks to DARPA contests, will change cities, manufacturing, energy, and of course travel, not just by driving us (saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars) but also by delivering, parking, and refueling themselves to save the electric car and the planet.
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Malawi has a population of 14 million. One million have HIV and there are just 280 doctors in the country. Baobab Health deploys touchscreen computers to clinics that guide nurses through the complex process of HIV treatment. The combination of hacked hardware and open source software is challenging conventional ideas about what is possible in a place without doctors or electricity.
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Governments all over the world are moving to censor various kinds of online and mobile content, and to expand their capacity to spy on people's digital communications. While the problem is worst in authoritarian countries, democracies are by no means immune. Meanwhile companies and others trying to provide web and telecoms services are caught uncomfortably in the middle.
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In his 1963 science fiction book "The Game Players of Titan," Philip K. Dick envisioned a form of government based on gameplay. Everything from real estate law to municipal policy to marriage contracts were not only derived from playing the game, but the design and sociality of the game had replaced government itself.
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Current global disease control efforts focus largely on attempting to stop pandemics after they have already emerged. This fire brigade approach, which generally involves drugs, vaccines, and behavioral change, has severe limitations.
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